Singapore's A*Star SGI Super: 2112 Cores in a Single System Image

In my recent interview with Eng Lim Goh, SGI’s CTO, we talked quite a but about the Altix UV 1000, the company’s big shared-memory supercomputer. Now SGI has announced that Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) has purchased an SGI Altix UV 1000 to accelerate public sector research and development in biomedical sciences, physical sciences, and engineering.

A*STAR researchers will be able to use Altix UV 1000 to advance knowledge and accelerate solutions to critical problems in natural sciences, technology and engineering, such as complex structural mechanics and fluid dynamics applied to industrial processes, discovering new catalysts and chemical compounds, and designs of electromagnetic, opto-electronic and photonic systems,” said Marek Michalewicz, director, A*STAR Computational Resource Centre. “Computational biologists at A*STAR in genomics, cancer research, drug discovery, protein dynamics, cell and organ simulation will also benefit immensely.”

The A*STAR supercomputer has 2,112 cores and 12.3 TB of shared memory, as well as 32 TB of Panasas PAS 8 high performance storage. The system was chosen for its affinity for very large memory jobs, as well the ability to run parallel jobs that do not scale well on other clustered systems due to excessively high communication latencies.

Resource Links:

Latest Video

Industry Perspectives

"Exascale computers are going to deliver only one or two per cent of their theoretical peak performance when they run real applications; and both the people paying for, and the people using, such machines need to have realistic expectations about just how low a percentage of the peak performance they will obtain." [Read More...]